Apr 99 Challenge

by Bob Boonstra, Westford, MA

Shortest Network

This month's problem was suggested by Michael Kennedy, who wins two Challenge points for making the suggestion. The problem is to find the shortest network of line segments interconnecting a specified set of points. Shortest network algorithms have obvious practical application in constructing transportation and communications networks. In a January 1989, Scientific American article, Marshall Bern and Ronald Graham discussed the shortest network "Steiner" problem as one of a class of NP-hard problems. While no polynomial-time algorithm is known, the article (which, unfortunately, I have not been able to find online) discusses practical algorithms that produce networks slightly longer than the optimal one. Your Challenge for this month is to produce a near-optimal network in minimum time. Fortunately, we have been granted unlimited power of eminent domain, so there are no restrictions on where intermediate nodes may be placed or where connections may be routed.

Your ShortestNetwork routine will be given a list of numInitialNodes nodes to connect. You may add intermediate nodes to help you form a shorter network, and must produce as output a list of connections between pairs of nodes. The connections must provide a path between any pair of the initial nodes.

Your solution must return the number of intermediate nodes added to the network in *numIntermediateNodes, while storing the location of those nodes in nodes[numInitialNodes+k], k=0..*numIntermediateNodes-1. A connection is specified by storing the indices of the two nodes being connected into the connection array. Your ShortestNetwork routine should return the number of connections created.

The maxNodes and maxConnections parameters indicate how much storage has been allocated for nodes and connections. It is my intention to allocate enough storage for all the nodes and connections your solution might create, but if it turns out that there is not enough storage, your solution should return a value of -1 to indicate that storage was exhausted.

The winner will be the solution that generates the shortest network in the minimum amount of time. Specifically, your solution will be assigned a cost equal to the sum of the distances between nodes in your list of connections, plus a penalty of 10% for each second of execution time. Solutions that do not connect all of the initial nodes will be penalized with a very large cost. The solution with the lowest total cost over a series of networking problems will be the winner.

This will be a native PowerPC Challenge, using the latest CodeWarrior environment. Solutions may be coded in C, C++, or Pascal. Thanks to Michael for suggesting this Challenge.

Three Months Ago Winner

Congratulations to Tom Saxton for submitting the winning solution to the January Sphere Packing Challenge. You may recall that this Challenge was to pack a set of spheres of varying size into a box with minimum volume, and to do so in the shortest amount of time possible. Tom submitted one of only two solutions received for this Challenge, and his was the only one that performed correctly.

Tom's approach is to decide on a footprint for the box to contain the spheres, "drop" the spheres individually into the box until they hit another sphere or the bottom of the box, while attempting to move the dropped sphere around the obstacle without going outside the box footprint. The solution then iterates with random movements to try to converge to a better solution. Tom observed in his submission that the time penalty for this problem (1% per millisecond of execution time) was very severe, making it unproductive to let his algorithm iterate very long. Every tenth of a second of execution time requires a factor of 2 reduction in volume to be productive, a rate of improvement smaller than what Tom was able to achieve.

I evaluated the solutions using six test cases with between 200 and 2000 spheres per test case. As one might expect, execution time grew exponentially with the number of spheres. A test case with 1000 spheres took about 20 times as long to solve as a 200-sphere case, and a 2000-sphere case took about 4 times longer than the 1000-sphere case. Tom's solution generated solutions that, in aggregate, occupied between 1.3 and 3.9 times the volume of individual cubes containing the individual spheres, which suggests that better solutions could be achieved with a more relaxed time penalty.

The table below lists, for each of the solutions submitted, the total volume of the boxes containing the spheres, the total execution time, and the total score including the time penalty, as well as the code and data sizes for each entry. As usual, the number in parentheses after the entrant's name is the total number of Challenge points earned in all Challenges prior to this one.

Name

Volume (x1.0E12)

Time (secs)

Score (x1.0e12)

Code Size

Data Size

Tom Saxton (79)

65.3

142.3

10107.2

5796

372

A. D.

*

*

*

820

104

Top Contestants

Listed here are the Top Contestants for the Programmer's Challenge, including everyone who has accumulated 20 or more points during the past two years. The numbers below include points awarded over the 24 most recent contests, including points earned by this month's entrants.

Munter, Ernst 200

Saxton, Tom 99

Boring, Randy 56

Mallett, Jeff 50

Rieken, Willeke 47

Maurer, Sebastian 40

Heithcock, JG 37

Cooper, Greg 34

Murphy, ACC 34

Lewis, Peter 31

Nicolle, Ludovic 27

Brown, Pat 20

Day, Mark 20

Higgins, Charles 20

Hostetter, Mat 20

There are three ways to earn points: (1) scoring in the top 5 of any Challenge, (2) being the first person to find a bug in a published winning solution or, (3) being the first person to suggest a Challenge that I use. The points you can win are:

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